Roadwork - Stephen King [23]
"Sure. Are you running a fever?"
"Dno. Well, baybe a liddle."
"Want me to make an appointment with Fontaine for you?"
"Dno. I will toborrow if I don'd feel bedder."
"You're really stuffy."
"Yes. The Vicks helbed for a while, bud dow-" She shrugged and smiled wanly. "I soud like Dodald Duck."
He hesitated a moment and then said, "I'll be home a little bit late tomorrow night. "
"Oh?"
"I'm going out to Northside to look at a house. It seems like a good one. Six rooms. A little backyard. Not too far from the Hobarts."
Freddy said quite clearly: Why, you dirty low-life son of a bitch.
Mary brightened. "That's woderful! Cad I go look with you?"
"Better not, with that cold."
"I'll huddle ub."
"Next time," he said firmly.
"Ogay." She looked at him. "Thang God you're finally booing on this," she said. "I was worried."
"Don't worry."
"I wodn't."
She took a sip of the hot rum drink and snuggled against him. He could hear her breath snuffling in and out. Merv Griffin was chatting with James Brolin about his new movie, Westworld. Soon to be showing at barbershops all over the country.
After a while Mary got up and put TV dinners in the oven. He got up, switched the TV over to reruns of "F Troop" and tried not to listen to Freddy. After a while, though, Freddy changed his tune.
Do you remember how you got the first TV, Georgie?
He smiled a little, looking not at Forrest Tucker but right through him. I do, Fred. I surely do.
They had come home one evening, about two years after they were married, from the Upshaws, where they had been watching "Your Hit Parade" and "Dan Fortune," and Mary had asked him if he didn't think Donna Upshaw had seemed a little well, off. Now, sitting here, he could remember Mary, slim and oddly, fetchingly taller in a pair of white sandals she had gotten to celebrate summer. She had been wearing white shorts, too; her legs looked long and coltish, as if they really might go all the way up to her chin. In truth, he hadn't been very interested in whether or not Donna Upshaw had seemed a little off; he had been interested in divesting Mary of those tight shorts. That had been where his interest lay-not to put too fine a point on it.
"Maybe she's getting a little tired of serving Spanish peanuts to half the neighborhood just because they're the only people on the street with a TV," he said.
He supposed he had seen the little frown line between her eyes-the one that always meant Mary was cooking something up, but by then they were halfway upstairs, his hand was roaming down over the seat of those shorts-what little seat there was-and it wasn't until later, until after, that she said:
"How much would a table model cost us, Bart?"
Half asleep, he had answered, "Well, I guess we could get a Motorola for twenty-eight, maybe thirty bucks. But the Philco-"
"Not a radio. A TV."
He sat up, turned on the lamp, and looked at her. She was lying there naked, the sheet down around her hips, and although she was smiling at him, he thought she was serious. It was Mary's I-dare-you grin.
"Mary, we can't afford a TV."
"How much for a table model? A GE or a Philco or something?"
"New?"
"New?"
He considered the question, watching the play of lamplight across the lovely round curves of her breasts. She had been so much slimmer then (although she's hardly a fatty now, George, he reproached himself; never said she was, Freddy my boy), so much more alive somehow. Even her hair had crackled out its own message: alive, awake, aware
"Around seven hundred and fifty dollars," he said, thinking that would douse the grin but it hadn't.
"Well, look, " She said, sitting up Indian-fashion in bed, her legs crossed under the sheet.
"I am," he said, grinning
"Not at that. " But she laughed, and a flush had spread prettily down her cheeks to her neck (although she hadn't pulled the sheet up, he remembered).
"What's on your mind?"
"Why do men want a TV?" she asked. "To watch all the sports on the weekends. And why do women want one? Those soap operas in the afternoon. You can listen